If you are in marketing or sales, you can not skip facing challenges! Even the most high-If you are in marketing or sales, you can not skip facing challenges! Even the most high-performing team faces hurdles in creating and sustaining relationships with the audience and effectively communicating with them.
How do you set yourself apart? Take a strategic approach to handle your challenges in B2B sales by working alongside the respective team with their shared goals, KPIs, and other key metrics. You must stress over the question- what challenges you most about B2B outbound marketing?
Sure, every sales rep wishes to have a celebratory win at the end of the month evaluation. Sadly, most sales reps end up with decreased and unfulfilled sales conversions as per the set target.
We can observe that both the marketing and sales teams are plagued with their own set of challenges in B2B sales to avoid disappointment. So, wondering how to overcome marketing challenges? Analyze what are the challenges of b2b sales and marketing.
To ease it up for you, we have covered a list of outbound marketing challenges and their solutions. Let’s hop on to the blog to learn them.
8 Outbound Challenges of B2B Sales and Marketing
Challenge 1- Identifying the Qualified Leads
Attracting leads and ensuring to meet quality over quantity is not an easy task when it comes to challenges of b2b sales. It does not make sense for a sales rep to spend time talking to someone who is not sure about purchasing. Often marketers spend a lot of budget on finding leads, but they either end up with no performing leads or unqualified leads.
B2B Outbound Marketing Solution:-
Not having the right leads is a major challenges in B2B sales. Make sure that you find qualified leads by the best B2B email database provider. They help you find the best leads with less marketing budget. Also, to overcome this challenge in your B2B aspect, you must spend good enough time understanding your B2B contact prospects. You can segment the B2B email database into leads who are interested in talking about sales with you. Treat those leads in the early stages to take them through the buyers’ journey with positive conversion.
Challenge 2- Prospects Do not Respond
There are often chances when all your product positioning and brand positioning are up to the mark, yet you cannot close the deal. There are times when your prospects do not respond to you. In several cases under challenges of b2b sales, sales representatives observe a drop in the customers’ response. And at this point, sales reps end up either not paying enough attention or ignoring such prospects.
B2B Outbound Marketing Solution:-
A sales rep must have the ability to handle customers who do not respond after a few interactions. The best way is to create a message and a campaign that ignites the curiosity of their customers. You can initiate a conversation with someone else in the company. Learn about the working and responsive hours for your prospects to reach out to them at their time. You can begin by emailing or calling them at different times of the day to gather the knowledge of their best hours.
Challenge 3- Long & Complex Sales Strategy
There are chances that prospects entering the sales cycle might not convert in the end- one of the greatest challenges of b2b sales. It may be because of a long and complex outbound sales strategies where they get stuck for a long time without any progress. This is one of the primary reasons how sales reps affect their conversion ratio.
Outbound Marketing Solution:-
Start with a good selling proposition, and ensure that it resonates with your prospects. Improve the rate and quality of your contact. Speak to your prospects and scrutinize the deals in the pipeline regularly. Above all, follow-up is equally important to improve prospect engagement. Also, ensure that you must rack your sales data to leverage the information for further sales conversion.
Challenge 4- Lack of Interaction with Decision Makers
It is essential to get through to the right decision-makers for their conversion. And, sales reps face difficulties in dodging the gatekeepers to present their product to the relevant decision-maker with the purchasing power. Research says that 60% of sales reps spend their time with people who cannot or will not buy their product or service.
Outbound Marketing Solution:-
Be confident in connecting with people who actually have the decision-making power or the final say. Always make sure to present the benefits of involving the product to the prospects. Begin with impressing the gatekeepers and persuading them to allow you to connect with the decision-maker and the relative operational issues.
Challenge 5- Lack of Focus on Outbound Sales Strategies
Sales reps are sometimes burdened with other administrative tasks that end up consuming their precious hours in petty tasks. Consequently, this affects their performance and leaves only approximately 36.6% of their time for actual selling.
Outbound Marketing Solution:-
Employ automation tools that help handle petty tasks and allow you more time to sell and set workflows. Find meaning and worth in each task and fix a time limit for each to complete them quickly. You may put up a request to hire a sales support personnel for the same too. Additionally, have all your marketing materials like brochures, flyers, business cards, case studies, etc., handy. If you’re interested in learning how to make a flyer, you can also checkout the following templates for flyers for some inspiration.
Challenge 6- Not Tracking Prospect Activities
Not keeping track of prospect activities leads to lost opportunities- one of the major challenges of B2B sales. Since they do not understand prospects’ behavior, sales reps are unable to segregate or filter the low-quality prospect. As a result, they end up spending their precious time which they can spend on the high potential prospects.
Outbound Marketing Solution:-
Integrate with CRM software to gain insight into the prospect’s engagement to explore more about the leads. With the updated CRM, you can keep yourself updated with the prospect activity when the deal is inactive and the high potential leads. A smart CRM helps in reviewing the interaction activity with the prospects via the activity timeline.
Challenge 7- Deal with Prospect Trust Issues
Prospects do not plan on investing in products or services if they do not trust your brand. And, gaining their trust is not easy as they have already come across companies that did not fulfill their promise or failed to provide the expected value.
Outbound Marketing Solution:-
While you speak to your prospects, hear them, understand their pain points, and take into account their troubles. Once you analyze their issue, try giving a solution that your business provides and make sure to provide them with a little evidence like customer testimonials. Always be on your toes to respond to their queries.
Challenge 8- Unrealistic Management Expectations
Sales reps are burdened and pressured with a bunch of goals set by management. In order to fulfill their expectations, the sales reps over-exert themselves, which sometimes affects their performance. Often, this also acts as a hurdle for B2B Outbound Marketing Strategies planned by either the management or sales reps.
Outbound Marketing Solution:-
Management shall not overburden sales reps. In case the sales rep feels so, you must stay calm and confident in your methodology of handling the tasks and dealing with conversions. By leveraging the reports of sales reps, the leads in the pipeline, and other outbound activities to explain the reasons for the low sale. Make sure that you track your performance and understand where you are going wrong to identify the areas of improvement and work on them.
Challenge 9- Competing with Lower-Priced Competitors
One of the most common strategies used by competitors to increase their sales is by lowering the price of the product or service. Sure, beating these lowballers can be tricky, but it is not impossible.
Outbound Marketing Solution-
Analyze your product, price, and services to create a clear comparison chart on your website and represent it to your prospects. Assume that your customers already know the competitors, and then be explicit about your comparison.
First, you need to educate your buyers about the product and explain the benefits of the product via the demo, blog, videos, seminars, etc. Simultaneously, you need to analyze your own USP of the product to convey the right message to the prospects. Understand that customers need to be informative about the product before they spend their money.
Customers do not mind spending an extra few dollars for a better quality product/ service. Try to display your value and worth to the customers via customer testimonials, white papers, or case studies.
Now, the question arises – What To Do When Your Sales Marketing Is Not Performing? There are so many methodologies a sales reps team can anchor to for improving their sales. The one that stands apart from others has the right B2B contact database. To help, Ampliz offers a verified and comprehensive list of B2B prospects.
B2B email databases created by the data experts at Ampliz are gathered, screened, and verified via a three-step process before recording them under the master data repository. The database contains multiple attributes for you to filter your data and target your ideal prospect. You can segregate your data based on firmographic, demographic, and technographic details.
Ampliz has 800+ data researchers Experts to handle the data and verify them via manual, artificial, and machine learning. This ensures that the data is updated and fresh for every business. Give it a try!
However, before you have the database handy, you also need to be in touch and coordinate with the sales team. And the best way to do this is to ask a few questions to the sales team.
10 Questions To Ask Your Sales Team
Even though Sales and marketing go hand in hand, a lot is expected from the sales team as they are responsible for the final conversion. Therefore, to have them streamlined with the business and marketing efforts, there are many questions they should be able to answer or at least know the answers to.
Whether the sales team engages in weekly, monthly, or quarterly reviews for their sales reps, knowing answers to these questions is essential. Here is the list of questions to ask your sales team:
- What is the status of the prospects in the pipeline compared to the last week’s conversion?
- What are the hurdles and challenges to meeting the goals?
- What is the sales strategy for the upcoming prospects or leads?
- How realistic are the objectives, and how to achieve them in the given time frame?
- What is the focus of communication with the prospects?
- Are there enough activities performed to help push sales?
- How has customers’ behavior evolved over a period of time?
- What are the self-improvement areas for each sales representative in the team?
- What aspects of the sales process do they not understand?
- Are they aligned with the marketing team to serve the prospects?
Besides asking questions to your sales teams, you also need to have verified and authentic B2B sales Prospect Data. Let’s learn how to build B2B Sales Prospects data!
How To Build B2B Sales Prospects Data?
There are a myriad of methods and tools to find and build B2B Sales prospects data to target your potential prospects. You need to find the right methodologies to adopt for finding your B2B prospects that suit your business needs. To help, we’ve listed down some of the methods below:
#1. Cold Calling
Cold calling is the most traditional yet effective way to build your B2B sales prospect data. You simply have to reach out to the contact and ignite their interest in your product or service. However, you must make sure that the prospect is willing to make a purchase from your business. Or else the effort will be vain. Even though they can appear to be a little annoying for the prospects, they can help build a strong rapport with the B2B prospects if handled correctly.
#2. Inbound Leads
Rather than performing outbound marketing or sales strategy, it is essential to also leverage the inbound leads. Inbound leads can be generated from the different lead magnets you curate and advertise. It can be via content marketing, email marketing, ebooks, whitepapers, blogs, webinars, etc. You can engage more prospects with your brand instead of adopting the pushy and salesy method. It also helps in building the business credibility, ensuring better returns on investment.
#3. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is another prospecting platform from which you can find a good list of B2B prospects by using different tools available. How? Simply filter your ideal customer profile via the filter options, and target the ones that resonate with your prospects. Most B2B buyers use LinkedIn to find their ideal prospects and target them.
#4. Prospect Automation Tool
Another prevailing method for building B2B Sales prospects is by leveraging the social media automation tools. It involves handling and automating the marketing activities for the business. It eases the process for marketers and sales reps to handle the prospects. It includes social media posts, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, event registrations, etc.
Benefits Of Sales Prospects Data In Outbound Marketing
#1. Get Quality B2B Prospect Leads
When you implement a strategic and effective outbound marketing plan, you can get quality B2B leads in a little matter of time. Your sales funnel will be blessed to process the prospects that actually convert. With the right outbound strategy employed, you can target the right companies and ideal prospects.
#2. Give a Boost to your Marketing
Since you are already bringing the best to the table, your marketing efforts get a boost. As a result, you end up spending less for more, or in other words, we can say the business enjoys more ROI.
#3. Align your Sales and Marketing Efforts (Smarketing)
When you perform Outbound Strategies, you are aligning your sales and marketing efforts together. This is because when you implement the strategy, you are not only marketing to the prospects to attract or target them, but you are also indulging in lead generation. You need not spend different budgets on marketing and sales to generate leads- club it into one and relish ROI benefits.
#4. Communicate with Right Prospects
When you have sales and marketing aligned in the outbound marketing strategies, you can approach the right prospect, target them, qualify them for the sales cycle and convert them into customers. It ensures that you are communicating the ideal prospects that your business needs.
How Much Time Should A Salesperson Spend Prospecting?
The potential pitfall for salespeople is spending enough time prospecting. It is essential to indulge in enough hours; otherwise, the companies bring a negative impression to the brand. The prospects’ expectations need to be met and are reasonable within the time frame.
In order to reduce your hours spent on your prospecting, you can leverage the B2B email database from Ampliz. Decide on your ideal customer profile and target them within a few seconds. The database can be easily filtered and used for prospecting to find the right B2B prospects in the industry.
Buy B2B prospect Database from the right Service Provider
There are several databases or APAC sales intelligence providers in the market to buy b2b prospect data, that you can anchor to for boosting your marketing and sales activities. One of the leading B2B database providers is Ampliz. It offers a comprehensive list of database solutions to the business. Depending upon your ideal customer profile, you can select the one that meets your needs and start prospecting.
